The Cleaner of Chartres (6 page)

Chartres

Although Agnès could neither read nor write, she had a marked numerical ability. In the class for backward children at the local school near the convent, as with all the other slow learners, she was largely given up on, until an enterprising student teacher noticed her. She had observed the small girl concentratedly counting out tiddly-winks and placing the different colours in a series of complex designs. The student, who was to become the kind of teacher with ambitions for her pupils, took to the pretty girl with the appealing eyes and made the child her special project.

As a result Agnès could read ten- or even twelve-figure numbers, including those with decimal points, and could add, subtract and multiply very efficiently in her head. She could also do long division and plot a graph. Perhaps she could also do algebra, though the student teacher had left before her young student’s talent could be further tried.

Agnès began her assault on the professor’s papers by sorting the letters according to date. When the professor put his head round the door a little later she inquired, ‘Have you any other letters?’ She had divined the contents of the drawers.

By the end of two weeks, seventy-five years’ worth of letters had been neatly clipped together according to the year, filed in transparent folders and placed in three yellow boxes, each of which was labelled with the dates of the correspondence. The boxes, she decided, would fit on the shelf at the top of the wardrobe.

‘I think you could store them in there, Professor. I’ve cleaned it out.’ Agnès indicated a number of plastic bags filled with clothes. ‘I don’t think we should bother with the charity shops.’

‘How about the beggars by the cathedral?’

Agnès, who knew several of the beggars by name and was aware that even they might turn up their noses at the professor’s matted jerseys, said she could try but she thought that maybe the clothes were best thrown out.

Before she left, the professor insisted on giving her a glass of white wine.

‘I’m sorry it isn’t cold – seems to be something wrong with the fridge. God knows where my wine glasses have gone. Frankly, I’m incredulous, Agnès. However did you manage all this?’

Agnès accepted the tumbler of wine and some stale salted biscuits from a chipped plate with ‘Welcome to Aberystwyth’ still just discernible to those who could read. ‘It’s easier when it’s not your own stuff.’ She tried to resist her urge to wipe over the glass, which was bleared with grease. Failing, she gave the lip a surreptitious scrub with her overall.

‘But still, you’re a genius. When can you start on the rest?’

‘I’ll come tomorrow morning if you like when I’ve finished at the cathedral.’

•   •   •

The Abbé Bernard was not merely losing his faith; he appeared to be losing his wits as well, and there was only so much that she could take, Agnès decided, of his mounting distress. She was an early riser, so in order to limit the time she would be exposed to his misery she must get there well before he was likely to arrive.

In any case, she loved the cathedral in its state of desertion, the only movement within its great space her own, or the shadowy flight of the odd sparrow. The tremendous height of the ceilings, the noble lofty columns – like lichen-covered trees – the succession of soaring arches, affected her profoundly and the jewelled brilliance of the stained glass, re-created in the ephemeral butterflies of light which played over the grey stone, lifted and brightened her darker thoughts.

Because of the restoration programme, the whole of the choir was closed off and half of the ambulatory behind. A complex of scaffolding had been assembled for the work on the ceiling plaster. The day after she had completed the filing of the professor’s letters, Agnès entered the cathedral to find she was not alone. A man was there. A man with an open knife in his hand, sitting bold as brass on the marble dais by the silver altar, right beside the sign that forbade people to mount it.

She stopped dead and a bolt of fear flashed down her sternum. ‘What are you doing here?’

The man put down the knife and looked at her for some seconds before replying.

‘You’re the cleaner. I’ve seen you.’

‘Where?’ The alarm flashed down her sternum again.

For answer, the man jerked his chin towards the scaffolding. ‘Up there you can see most things.’

‘You’re one of the workmen?’

‘I’m part of the team.’

‘I see.’

‘You always get here early?’

Habit made her cautious. ‘Now and then.’

‘We’re behind. Restoration works are always behind so I’m going to be in early from now on. Get the benefit of the morning light before autumn.’

‘I see,’ Agnès said again. As if that was sufficient excuse to allow him to penetrate her sanctuary at this hour.

The man smiled. He had a long lean face, of a slightly mournful cast until he smiled. ‘I’m Alain.’

‘I’m Agnès.’

‘That’s a pretty name.’

Agnès, embarrassed, nodded.

‘Would you like some sausage? I was having a spot of breakfast.’

‘I’ve eaten.’

The man smiled again. ‘I don’t plan to get in your hair.’

‘It’s none of my business.’

‘You needn’t fret. I’m not chatty myself.’

‘Nor me,’ Agnès said, further embarrassed at being read.

‘I can see that. I’m on your patch. But don’t worry, there’s space enough for the two of us.’

Agnès went to find her cleaning materials. When she came back there was no one on the dais, but she could hear whistling from above.

When the Abbé Bernard arrived, Agnès was about to leave.

‘Off already, Agnès?’

‘I’ve finished the work for today, Father.’

The Abbé Bernard scrabbled at her forearm. ‘I dreamed last night that my mother was drowning in a duck pond. Mud, thick mud. Maybe worse. Maybe . . . and I stood there watching. I did nothing to save her.’

‘It’s a dream, Father. It happens when people die.’

The Abbé Bernard looked at her with scared exhausted eyes. ‘Should I be feeling guilty?’

Agnès gently detached his hand from her sleeve. ‘That happens too, Father, when people die. You will get used to it.’

Chartres

Professor Jones had been utterly absorbed since he opened the yellow box on which Agnès had stuck a label bearing the dates 1935–1955. There, before his eyes, lay the first twenty years of his life, neatly assembled in transparent folders. He took out the top letter, which was written in blue ink on blue-lined paper.

‘My dear Bronwen,’ the professor read. ‘The news of little Owen’s timely arrival last evening brought us the greatest joy.’

The professor turned the page to see who had written to his mother to celebrate his birth. He read the signature in the clear cursive hand: ‘Mother’.

Nana. His Nana with whom he had gone to stay as a little boy. ‘Da and I are so thrilled,’ he read on. ‘We shall be making the journey, God willing, to see you all as soon as you tell us to come. Meantime I am knitting away in the blue wool. Annie has taken back the pink I got in, in case, though we all said it would be a boy and praise the Lord he is.’

The professor’s eyes began to prick. Days of heavy scones, thick with cream and running with blackcurrant jam, a pony which bit him with big yellow teeth when he tried to feed it a carrot, rain on warm grass wetting his socks, a cut foot from a broken bottle in a rock pool, sardine sandwiches, sand in his socks, roly-poly down a hillside – the revenant years began to fill out as he read.

Agnès had not been able to follow a strict system. She had put together all the letters which looked as if they came from the same hand in the order of their date. On the few occasions when there was no date (luckily the professor’s correspondents tended not to depart from the correct etiquette of letter-writing), she appended them, clipped together, to the back.

Nana Williams had always followed the proper forms so every letter written, either to her daughter or, later, to her grandson, was there filed in chronological order.

‘My dear Owen,’ he read. ‘Here is a ten-shilling postal order for your birthday. Grandda and I hope you will buy something for the train set. Grandda suggests maybe a turntable or some signals. We hope you will soon be coming on the big train to Aberystwyth to see us. Phoebe’ – their black-and-white cat, Owen Jones, alone on his single divan in the faraway town of Chartres, remembered – ‘is looking forward to seeing you.’

•   •   •

‘She’s a cow,’ Terry said categorically. ‘I can’t think what possessed you to take her on. You should get out while you can.’

She and Agnès had been for their weekly swim. Agnès, naked, was rubbing herself down with a towel. ‘It’s work.’

‘Do you need it? You never spend a sou as far as I can see. What are you saving for?’

But if Agnès was saving for anything she didn’t say.

‘I bet the pay’s really mean,’ Terry, slightly sulky, said. Like many apparently well-intentioned people, she was prone to take offence when her advice went unheeded. Looking at Agnès’ naked body, she relented. ‘Why don’t you pose some more for old Robert? He pays well, doesn’t he?’

Agnès shrugged. ‘I do but –’

‘Is he a lecher?’

‘Not really. It’s more . . .’ But she didn’t complete the sentence because Terry would not understand. Sitting so still for hours, with or without her clothes, brought on dark thoughts.

‘How many jobs have you got now, anyway?’

Agnès collected her thoughts. ‘My old regulars, the Duchamps, the Poitiers and there’s still Madame Badon. Then there’s the cathedral and now Madame Beck.’

‘And the professor.’

‘He’s not “cleaning”.’

‘I don’t know what you’d call it, then,’ said Terry, who had seen the plastic bags stuffed with the contents of the professor’s wardrobe. ‘How much do you charge these days?’

‘Twelve to fifteen euros. Depends when I took them on.’ The truth was Agnès operated a sliding scale. The Poitiers, with five kids, could not afford more than ten euros an hour and even then she sometimes waited a week or so before being paid.

‘I hope you’ve made old Beck pay top rate.’

Agnès, who had already agreed, without demur, to Madame Beck’s proposed rate of ten euros an hour, said that she had.

‘How much you charging the professor?’

‘I don’t know,’ Agnès admitted. ‘We haven’t discussed it yet.’

•   •   •

When Agnès got to the professor’s apartment, she found the yellow boxes on the floor where she had left them.

‘I’ve been reading through,’ the professor confessed. ‘Things I’d quite forgotten. People too. It’s amazing what one forgets.’

Agnès, who felt it might be a relief to forget, nodded. ‘We’ll leave them there for the moment, then. Should I get on?’

‘Do. Do.’ The professor went back to perusing two letters, each with a Scottie dog embellishing a corner, that he had received from Lorraine Partridge, a girl he had met at university. She’d had thick brown wavy hair, he recalled. And a light blue bra. He’d once got to the bra, after some effort and a lot of courage, but had not managed to unhook it, though with hindsight perhaps she was less unwilling that he should undo it than he had understood at the time. The professor sighed. So many wasted opportunities.

Agnès had determined that today was the day to begin to tackle the photographs. These she had amassed from a variety of hiding-places – envelopes, notebooks, old albums with black-and-white childhood snaps (taken, in fact, by the professor himself with a Brownie camera given to him by Nana and Grandda) – and arranged in piles in the study. It would be easier for her to order these than the letters since it involved no reading. Some, obligingly, had dates on the back in faded ink or pencil. But many Agnès could group by studying the characters.

There was the white-haired old couple who appeared first with a well-cocooned baby on the woman’s lap, a baby that over a period of time translated itself into a youthful professor, first in long shorts and round spectacles, later into a youth in long trousers and a bad case of acne. From a picture taken at a beach – of the white-haired woman, a younger woman who looked like a daughter and the unmistakable young professor with plump bare legs and a shrimping net – Agnès deduced that a number of tiny black-and-white photos with crimped edges were of the same beach and thus belonged in the section for the old people.

As she was arranging these on the professor’s desk, the professor himself came in.

‘My God. St Govan’s Beach. Now that truly takes me back.’ He began to shuffle through the pile and picked out one of the photos of the white-haired woman. ‘That’s my grandmother, Nana, we called her. My mother’s mother. She was, oh, would you know what I mean by archetypal, Agnès? She was like a grandmother in a story-book – always baking something, always kind.’ She had smelled of Coty’s talcum powder. Talcum in a dark pink canister with gold writing on it. Once, before they had had to leave, he had sneaked into her bedroom and found the tin and had sprinkled it on his stomach to remember her by. His parents had complained of the smell in the car all the way home. ‘Do you use talcum powder, Agnès?’

Agnès shook her head.

‘I expect your mum did, though. Look, that’s my mother. My God, but she looks young.’ He held out a photo of a serious-looking young woman with long, dark, waved hair wearing a waisted suit and a jaunty little hat set slantwise. ‘She looks like the heroine of a war movie. She might have been too. My father had just missed being done in at Dunkirk.’

Agnès said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t file these away. Maybe we could make something with them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘On the wall,’ Agnès said, looking at the dingy paper which contributed to the general pervading gloom of the professor’s study. ‘We could put your family pictures up there.’

Agnès returned to the stationers, where she bought three rolls of paper on which pictures and photographs could be tastefully stuck to form a collage. They spent the afternoon together making up a sheet celebrating Nana and Grandda.

‘That’s Grandda.’ A man in a beret wheeling a wheelbarrow. ‘That’s me in the wheelbarrow. He loved sweet peas, Grandda. I used to give him the seeds for his birthday.’ In a large packet, with pictures of the flowers they would become. Pink, mauve, blue and dark crimson flowers, which bloomed to give the sweetest scent. The professor, who could no longer smell any living flower, smelled again the heavenly scents of childhood.

The bells of the cathedral chimed for vespers. ‘I’ll have to leave soon, Professor,’ Agnès said.